China: The Big Chill

Step by step—so quietly, in fact, that the full facts of it can be startling—China has embarked on the most intense crackdown on free expression in years. Overshadowed by news elsewhere in recent weeks, China has been rounding up writers, lawyers, and activists since mid-February, when calls began to circulate for protests inspired by those in the Middle East and North Africa. By now the contours are clear: according to a count by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, the government has “criminally detained 26 individuals, disappeared more than 30, and put more than 200 under soft detention.”

Some of the disappeared have resurfaced; in one case that illustrates how strange it’s all getting around here, a novelist and blogger called his assistant to say he was being followed by three men, and then vanished for several days before resurfacing in a hospital, saying that he was “recovering” without specifying from what. He planned to fly out of the country tomorrow. (Others who have disappeared are not listed in the numbers above: the lawyer Gao Zhisheng vanished nearly a year ago; when human-rights monitors at the U.N. asked for information about him this week, the foreign ministry told them to “respect China’s judicial sovereignty”—an unfortunate choice of words, considering that Gao has yet to appear in a court of justice, as far as anyone knows.)

In some cases, the constraints are difficult to define; Philip Gourevitch wrote on Wednesday about the writer Liao Yiwu, who was barred this week from leaving China, though, as is often the case, he has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing. But one thing about the ongoing rash of arrests is startling, and it has potential impact on China beyond what the current crop of leadership might anticipate: authorities appear poised to hand down surpassingly strict sentences, which virtually guarantees that names which have been heretofore unknown to the world will soon become cause célèbre.

Last week, a court gave a ten-year sentence to the democracy activist Liu Xianbin for “inciting subversion of state power”—the same charges that were brought against the Nobel Peace Price winner Liu Xiaobo. That same charge has now been brought against three others: Chen Wei, a forty-two-year-old rights activist in Sichuan; Ding Mao, a forty-five-year-old dissident; and Ran Yunfei, perhaps the best known of the three, a writer with forty-four thousand Twitter followers.

And, yet, on a fundamental level, it appears politically stable in a way that many Arab countries were not. As I’ve described before, China is a rare creature: a high-functioning dictatorship. Its economy and security services work efficiently—either appeasing, contenting, or terrifying people away from organized unrest. For the moment, the real damage may be to China’s international stature. The Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, who enjoys academic rock-star status here because he coined “soft power,” a pillar of Chinese diplomacy these days, has concluded that China’s current wave of arrests is “torpedoing its soft-power campaign.”

He’s right. Remember the Nobel ceremony with that hauntingly empty chair for Liu Xiaobo? China is setting itself up for that—again, again, again, and again.